Take a Walk on the Dark Side

by R. Gary Patterson

  4 “MR. CROWLEY”

  —Ozzy Osbourne, “Mr. Crowley,” Blizzard of Ozz Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head?

  Mr. Crowley, did you talk with the dead?

  —Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

  —Martin Gardner, On the Wild Side His reputation had been that of a man who worshiped Satan, but it was more accurately said that he worshiped no one except himself.

  SURPRISINGLY, FEW PEOPLE RECOGNIZE THE PORTRAIT of the man with the clean-shaven head gazing ominously from the crowd of onlookers on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Perhaps some onlookers may be shocked when they learn that the likeness belongs to none other than Edward Alexander (Aleister) Crowley, whom the English press proclaimed “the wickedest man alive,” and whom his mother sweetly referred to as “The Great Beast” from the book of Revelation in the Bible. Crowley lovingly returned the favor by referring to his mother, Emily, as “a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and in-human type.”1 The many theories and adventures of Crowley helped shape the very mythology of drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

  Aleister Crowley’s early life was far from that of a man destined to “worship” Satan and the “dark side.” It is documented that at Crowley’s birth “on the infant’s body were, unknown to his mother or his evangelist father, the three most important distinguishing marks of a Buddha. He was tongue-tied, until the fraenum linguage was cut; he had the characteristic membrane which ‘necessitated an operation for phimosis some three lustres [fifteen years] later.’ Lastly, he had upon the centre of his heart four hairs curling from left to right in the exact form of a Swastika.”2 His parents raised him as a strict fundamentalist Christian within the Plymouth Brethren sect. As Crowley grew older he became rebellious against the teachings of the order and was eventually expelled from school for “corrupting” another boy. At the age of eleven, Crowley was said to have predicted his father’s death from cancer of the tongue, and at twelve years of age was dabbling with the butchery of cats and other animals (only in the name of science, of course): “His first victim was the family cat. He was eager to discover whether it had nine lives and administered a large dose of arsenic then chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull and, after it had been thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window so that the fall would remove its ninth life. He added, ‘I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the interest of pure science.’”3 Following the death of his father, Crowley received a large inheritance. This allowed him to indulge in a life of excess and constant debauchery.

  Ironically, Crowley attended Trinity College in Cambridge, and there he immersed himself in the study of the occult. It was at this time that Crowley took the name Aleister and became convinced that he was the reincarnation of an earlier magician, Alphonse-Louis Constant, who later took the magical name Eliphas Levi, based upon the Hebrew kabbalah. Through his studies Crowley found that he was born in the year that Levi had died, 1875. He also noticed that his life contained several parallels with Levi. Levi had been raised in a devout Catholic family and had studied for the priesthood. It was his love of magic and the occult that led to his expulsion from his order. Levi’s greatest work was Le Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Dogma and Ritual of High Magic). From this work Eliphas Levi stated that “to attain the sanctum regnum, in other words, the knowledge and the power of the magi, there are four indispensable conditions—an intelligence illuminated by study, an intrepidity which nothing can check, a will nothing can break, and a discretion which nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate. To know, to dare, to will, to keep silence—such are the four words of the magus.”4 The teachings of Levi helped influence not only a young Aleister Crowley, but also many teachings of the Rosicrucians and the Order of the Golden Dawn. It was said that Albert Pike borrowed many of Levi’s beliefs in the 1867 constitution of the Ku Klux Klan.5 Other influences can be found in the teachings of Gerald Gardner and Anton LaVey. Levi’s symbol of Baphomet, a satanic figure of a woman with a goat’s head, with an inverted pentagram on her forehead, was said to influence David Berkowitz in his ghastly Son of Sam murders and is the adopted symbol of the modern-day Church of Satan.

  Confronted with a better understanding of his destiny (Crowley also believed that he had lived other lives as Cagliostro and Pope Alexander VI), Crowley began his practice of the “black arts.” He was reported to have placed a curse on one of his professors by making a wax figure of the teacher. In the presence of several classmates, Crowley invoked a curse upon his hapless victim. Was he successful? Crowley didn’t seem too surprised to find that his prey had fallen down a flight of stairs and had broken his leg—the same leg that Crowley had cursed (or so he claimed). Crowley’s diabolic reputation continued to grow. As a young man he enjoyed mountain climbing. It was whispered that some of his climbing companions had met with sudden death and that in 1905 Crowley had left two partners to die in a terrible avalanche. His notorious reputation began to grow and he began to attract many followers with his newly found magic.

  In 1898, Aleister Crowley met George Cecil Jones, a member in good standing of the Order of the Golden Dawn. The order was a secret society that studied magic, alchemy, astrology, tarot, the kabbalah, and other occult practices. Its leader was S. L. MacGregor Mathers, who secured membership for himself by translating a mysterious coded manuscript concerning instructions of the kabbalah and the tarot. It seemed that Mathers’s wife was clairvoyant, and it was through her powers that the work was deciphered. According to Mrs. Mathers, the Golden Dawn studied “the intelligent forces behind Nature, the Constitution of man and his relation to God, the main objective being man’s ultimately regaining union with the Divine Man latent in himself.”6 Members of the Order of the Golden Dawn included such literary figures as Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, and William Butler Yeats. Each of these men had a keen interest in the super-natural and would attend meetings with the Matherses. These meetings would include spirit writings and a peculiar game of four-player chess. Yeats and Mrs. Mathers would play against MacGregor Mathers and a summoned spirit. Yeats’s magical name within the society was Daemon est Inversus (the devil is God reversed). It would later be Yeats who became instrumental in barring Crowley from advancement within the order. Yeats would claim, “We do not think that a mystical society was intended to be a reformatory.”7

  The appeal of secret occult societies has existed throughout history. In Great Britain, the Hellfire Clubs flourished in the eighteenth century. The most infamous was a sect started by Sir Francis Dashwood, whose membership included the Earl of Sandwich, Charles Churchill, and John Wilkes (members of Parliament), Lord Bute (Prime Minister of England), and Thomas Potter, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury (the highest churchman in England). Francis Dashwood would himself be appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Dashwood referred to his followers as the “Unholy Twelve,” and it was said that one very important guest at the festivities was Benjamin Franklin of the United States. Though black masses and incantations were used in an almost theatrical manner, it was sexual debauchery and the use of drugs and alcohol that served as the main rituals. The Hell-fire Clubs were outlawed in the later part of the eighteenth century following the downfall of Lord Bute’s government. Of course this was due to the revelation of the scandalous behavior of the “Unholy Twelve.” A precept that Crowley would borrow from the Hellfire Club was its very motto, “Do What Thou Wilt.” This phrase can first be found in Rabelais’s Abbey of Thelema from his Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Abbey represented the continued, everlasting pursuit of a life of excess. Crowley was so taken with this mystical place that he established his own pleasure palace he called “The Sacred Abbey of the Thelemic Mysteries” in Sicily. (After hearing of the strange rituals and the one death that occurred behind its walls, Mussolini had Crowley expelled from the country in 1
923.)

  After meeting George Cecil Jones, Crowley became an initiate of the Order of the Golden Dawn. He took as his magical name Brother Perdurabo, which translates as “I shall endure to the end.” Perhaps this should have served as a warning to Mathers. Crowley obviously enjoyed the ritualistic ceremonies but became dissatisfied with the order’s avoidance of drugs and sex. Crowley and Mathers argued violently and used magic against each other in the forms of conjured spirits and other spells. Obviously, this helped split the order. In 1900, Aleister Crowley left England in search of Eastern mysticism. He also purchased Boleskine House in Inverness, Scotland, oddly enough in the same vicinity that Shakespeare’s Macbeth had met with witches and sealed his own fate. This estate would later be purchased by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page in 1968. In 1903, Crowley married Rose Kelley; unknowingly, she was to help lay the foundation of Crowley’s greatest work.

  Throughout her life Rose Kelley had no hint of her developing powers of clairvoyance. It was during her honeymoon with Crowley that she mentioned to him that the Egyptian God Horus was trying to contact him. Since Rose had no early interest in the occult, an investigation into her sudden psychic powers became necessary. Crowley took his new wife to the Boulak Museum in Cairo and asked her to point out the god Horus. Incredibly, Rose Kelley led her husband to a painted funeral stela from the twenty-sixth dynasty. The god Horus was depicted receiving a sacrifice from a deceased priest who was named Ank-f-n-khonus. What really impressed Crowley was the number given to the exhibit—number 666. This had to be a sign that Rose would help Crowley usher in a new age of Horus. For three consecutive days (April 8, 9, and 10, 1904), Crowley sat in a darkened room while he claimed a shadowy presence recited to him what was to become The Book of the Law. Rumors spread that one of Crowley’s assistants went mad trying to help in the translation. Of course, this helped generate more publicity for Crowley and his sect. The shadowy presence was said to be Aiwass, a lesser god who served as Horus’s narrator to his newly found scribe and prophet. The law was called Thelema, a Greek word meaning “will,” and the precept of Thelema became “do as thou wilt.” An interpretation by some ardent Satanists utilizes this law to justify any means they may choose to obtain their will. Crowley meant that the phrase was to be interpreted simply as “live in harmony with your destiny.” It was not a license to do what you like. It may be interesting to note that Crowley never considered himself a Satanist, because he never chose to believe in God or the devil. Without a belief in one there cannot be a belief in the other. In Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” he states that “I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend.” Evidently, this was to become the harmony of his own personal destiny.

  Upon returning home from Egypt, Crowley adopted the Egyptian title “Prince Chioa Khan” and chose a title for his wife. Everyone was to address them only by their new titles. It was also at this time that Crowley referred to himself as “the great beast 666” and justified his new indulgences through this verse from The Book of the Law:

  Be strong, O man! Lust, enjoy all things of sense in nature: fear not that any god shall deny thee for this.

  Now ye shall know that the chosen priest and apostle of infinite space is prince-priest the Beast.

  In 1906, Crowley and Rose lost their young firstborn daughter. By 1909, a son was born, MacAleister, but by this time Crowley was granted a divorce and Rose died a tortured alcoholic in a mental asylum. Lady Caroline Lamb once claimed that the poet Byron was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” but perhaps Aleister Crowley deserves this appellation to a greater extent. Think of this: Crowley’s wife went insane, five mistresses committed suicide, and “scores of his concubines ended in the gutter as alcoholics, drug addicts, or in mental institutions.”8

  The personal feud between Mathers and Crowley ended with Mathers’s death in 1918. Of course, Crowley was quick to take credit by stating that he had placed a death curse upon the old enemy who had denied him the reign of the Brotherhood of the Golden Dawn. Crowley began his own secret society as an outlet for spreading his Thelemic doctrines. He was invited to join Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), a German magic society that is still in existence. It was said that this society had discovered the true secrets of magic and was descended from the Knights Templars who had also established the rights of Freemasonry. By this time Crowley had run out of his inheritance. He had always been a prolific writer who reveled in each accusation cast his way. His bizarre sense of humor sickened readers who considered what Crowley meant as the “perfect sacrifice”: “For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory and suitable victim.” Crowley also stated that he had performed this ritual 150 times a year between 1912 and 1928.9 This would suggest over 2,500 victims, but this grim humor was only meant to shock his audience. Strangely enough, legend has it that Crowley summoned some unnamed elemental spirit in some mystic rite and that his only son MacAleister died from a heart attack within the confines of the locked room.10

  In Crowley’s last years he became a hopeless drug addict, often injecting ten grains of heroin a day. In many cases one grain can be fatal. He discussed his lifestyle in his Diary of a Drug Fiend: “I am myself a physical coward, but I have exposed myself to every form of disease, accident, and violence.” (Crowley’s addiction to heroin began when he was a child. It seems that before the enforcement of drug laws, heroin was a prescription for chronic asthma, of which Crowley suffered throughout his life. Of course, he also experimented with many other drugs.) Due to his bizarre behavior, Crowley was removed from membership in many of his mystical orders, and he left for Sicily to find new followers. Those followers often turned out to already be alcoholics, drug addicts, or the emotionally disturbed. After the death of one of his disciples—sources claimed that the hapless victim “drank the blood of a distempered cat”—Crowley was deported from Sicily. With his return to London more accolades followed him. He was said to wear “a Perfume of Immortality made from one part ambergris, two parts musk, and three parts civet, which gave him a peculiar odor, but which he said attracted women and also horses, which always whinnied after him in the streets.”11 His behavior grew more and more erratic: “He had two of his teeth filed into a point, so he could give women the ‘Serpent’s Kiss’ when introduced. One woman, bitten on the arm, contracted blood poisoning; another had her left nipple bitten off and almost died from the resultant infection. He was prone to the most unsocial of habits, evacuating his bowels on drawing-room carpets, and when his hosts protested, he claimed his excreta was sacred…. He believed he could make himself invisible at will. Diners at the Café Royal in London were astonished when Crowley appeared one evening, dressed in a wizard’s robes and wearing a conical hat. He strode around the tables and left without saying a word. ‘There you are,’ he said afterward, ‘that proves I can make myself invisible! Nobody spoke to me, therefore they couldn’t have seen me.’”12

  On April 14, 1934, Crowley brought a libel suit against Constable and Co. Publishers and former friend Nan Hammett, author of Laughing Torso. In her book, Hammett stated that “Crowley had a temple in Cefalu in Sicily. He was supposed to practice Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously. There was also a goat there. This all pointed to Black Magic, so people said, and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.”13 For some strange reason Crowley thought that he could force through a quick settlement to help soothe his damaged character. When the defense attorneys got him on the stand he was barraged with epithets in which he was portrayed as “The monster of wickedness,” “a dirty degenerate cannibal,” and “the Great Beast 666.” Then an article from the Sunday Dispatch, written by Crowley himself, was read aloud: “They have called me the worst man in the world. They have accused me of murdering women and throwing their bodies in the Seine and to drug peddling.”14 The jury made their decision in the courtroo
m without deliberation and found unanimously against Crowley. He was in shock at the verdict. The results of the verdict made Aleister Crowley a complete outcast and led him to financial ruin. Ironically, his fall had to do with Eliphas Levi’s advice to the magus: to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silent. Unfortunately for Crowley, he didn’t heed Levi’s advice. It was impossible for Crowley to keep silent.

  Aleister Crowley died on December 1, 1947, at Hastings, England. It was said that true to his reputation, he cursed his physician for not giving him a last injection of morphine. The unfortunate doctor died within eighteen hours of Crowley’s death. (Ironically, Crowley’s alter ego, Eliphas Levi, had come back to his Christian faith and perished safely in the last rites of the Church.) Crowley’s other writings included Magick in Theory and Practice, The Book of Thoth, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings, and The Holy Books of Thelema. Thelemic holidays were established in the following manner: The Equinox of the Gods (March 20) marked the Thelemic New Year and began the Aeon of Horus in 1904; Three Days of the Writing of The Book of the Law (April 8, 9, 10) was the translation period of the book and each chapter was to be read on the day it was created; First Night of the Prophet and Bride (August 12) celebrated the first night of the marriage between Aleister Crowley and his wife Rose Kelley, who would play a great role in The Book of the Law’s translation; Crowleymas (October 12) was the anniversary of Crowley’s birth; and Crowley’s Greater Feast (December 1) was a celebration that marked the death of Aleister Crowley. Of course followers also attended the standard meetings at equinoxes in March and September, and solstices in June and December.